2.5 Stars.

The writing is beautiful – you can tell that Ocean Vuong is a poet in how he crafts his sentences. And the story is layered with a lot of important themes: the Vietnam War, immigration, the opioid crisis, drug addition, homosexuality... it's a LOT. And apparently the novel is (not so?) loosely based on Ocean's life story.

So why then, if there's so much substance and beauty, am I only giving it two stars? Because it was hard to follow. It bounced around and retold the same story in different ways, and at times I found myself confused about who he was talking to or writing about. This strikes me as the type of novel people claim to love because they are either a) poets or MFA holders who have a really deep appreciation for language and writing, or b) pretentious and want to seem smart.